Case Study

Digital Tool: Skill Builder

A guided, self-service tool that walks frontline employees from picking a skill to a downloadable, personalized development plan — built in Storyline with JavaScript PDF generation and xAPI reporting behind it.

Role: Learning Technologist / Learning Experience Developer / eLearning Developer / Web Designer
Primary Tools: Articulate Storyline · JavaScript · pdfmake · xAPI · LRS
Focus: UX/UI · PDF Generation · Progress Tracking · Analytics

Step 1 of the Skill Builder: a welcome screen and a list of skills to choose from — The tool opens on a simple, guided three-step flow: select a skill, build a plan, download the PDF.

The Challenge

Frontline employees needed a simple way to identify a skill they wanted to develop and turn that choice into an actionable development plan. The goal was a guided, self-service experience that made development planning easy to understand, personalize, and revisit over time.

My Approach

I developed the Skill Builder in Articulate Storyline, using a guided three-step experience — select a skill, build a development plan, and download a PDF copy of the finished plan.

After an employee selects a skill, the tool presents development opportunities organized around the 3E model: Experience (70%), Exposure (20%), and Education (10%). Employees check the opportunities they want and build a plan that reflects their own needs.

Learner Experience

The Skill Builder guides employees through three steps — Select a Skill, Build Your Plan, Download PDF of Plan — and the simple structure keeps it focused. After choosing a skill, employees review Experience, Exposure, and Education opportunities and check the activities they want. Selections persist between sessions so they can return and update the plan, while xAPI and LRS reporting give visibility into the plans created and the opportunities chosen.

Step 2 of the Skill Builder: Experience, Exposure, and Education tabs with checkboxes for each opportunity — Opportunities are grouped by Experience, Exposure, and Education; employees check the ones they want in their plan.

The generated Personalized Development Plan PDF, grouped by skill and 3E category — JavaScript and the pdfmake library generate a portable PDF from the employee’s selections.

Technology & Development

Articulate Storyline

Primary platform for the workflow, skill selection, checkboxes, variables, triggers, and progress functionality.

JavaScript + pdfmake

Used the pdfmake library to generate the PDF dynamically from the Storyline variables holding the selected opportunities.

Persistent Progress

Saved selections between sessions so plans could be revisited, updated, and completed over time.

xAPI / LRS Reporting

Tracked the plans created through the tool and built dashboards to analyze activity and the opportunities employees chose.

Business Impact

Created a simple, self-service experience that guided frontline employees from skill selection to a completed development plan.
Used the 3E model to organize development opportunities into Experience, Exposure, and Education.
Enabled employees to build and revisit personalized plans by saving checkbox selections between sessions.
Used xAPI and LRS dashboards to track and analyze the plans created and identify patterns in employee selections.
Added dynamic PDF generation so employees could download a portable copy of their completed plan.

What I Learned

This project strengthened my ability to use Articulate Storyline as an application-development platform, not just a course-authoring tool — and showed how Storyline variables, triggers, JavaScript, and an external library like pdfmake can combine into a practical, personalized digital tool.